The notion that people who think and communicate about sex are also likely to have it isn't a total surprise. But as with so many things concerning young people, we can't help but worry. We know that teenage sex can lead to all kinds of undesirable outcomes like unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and the impression that a man who lasts over 30 seconds in the sack is a 'good catch'. Tied up in all these anxieties about teens and sex is a hope that future generations won't make the mistakes we made, such as associating 'Ice Ice Baby' (the 1989 hip hop classic by US rapper Vanilla Ice) with losing your virginity forever.

Sexting, for those of you not up to speed on the latest embarrassing media-invented portmanteau, is when kids send dirty pictures and messages to each other via phone. It's apparently, a new thing. As opposed to back when I was a teen, when we went around making that finger-in-hole hand motion behind people's backs to indicate romantic interest. God, what innocents we were. The technology has clearly moved young-uns on.

I digress - so does the study actually tell us anything we need to be worried about? Turns out, not so much. This "sexting" epidemic? Apparently it's been vastly overstated. It's only about halfway through the paper itself that you get to the, er, money shot: a staggering one per cent, yes that's right, one per cent of teens in the study are sending sexually explicit bum, boob, and crotch-shot "sexts". Less than six per cent ever received such images, and almost no one is passing them on.

The NSPCC also weighed in recently with their opinion on sexting, claiming boys are routinely using sexts to harass girls, and that girls are being adversely affected as a result. Yet again another body assuming teenage girls are incapable of speaking up for themselves - a notion laughable to anyone who's familiar with teenage girls or has ever the good fortune to spend time in any major shopping centre of a Saturday afternoon.

"This study is the first to show what teens are doing with their cellphones and what they're doing with their bodies," claimed sociologist and author of the study Eric Rice, who gets to observe young people like they are some previously undiscovered species for a living. Not a bad research remit as far as these things go. Although it might be churlish of me to suggest that his research questions are a bit of a waste of time. The real mystery and what any of us really wants to know about teens and their sex lives, is why any jack one of them finds One Direction so unbelievably fascinating and alluring.